April 28, 2017

Peak Bubble

It is intellectually bogus, lazy, deceptive, pointless and distracting to talk about a thing, for example fathers with custody / access, when the thing in question is just a vehicle for some other idea you are trying to promote.

I said back in 1994 that the UK house price bubble was insane and unsustainable, and properties that were “worth” £45,000 then are “worth” £175,000 now with no end in sight.

I *still* think it is insane, and at no point in the intervening 23 years has my mind changed, interesting when you consider that had I gotten a 25 year mortgage back then, it would only have two more years to run, a 20 year mortgage would have been over three years ago.

So who is the asshole now?

I still think it’s an insane bubble, I just *vastly* under-estimated how long it could stay insane, and how much more insane it could get, shades of the old quote about markets being able to stay irrational longer than you are able to stay solvent.

I can relate a story of an individual who purchased a machine tool for 10k in cash three years ago, he went back to the vendor to buy a new tool costing 25k, again it would be a cash sale, three weeks have passed since his first email, 5 days since his second, not a fucking peep from the vendor… they obviously have better things to do than talk to someone who was a cash customer three short years ago.

At this point world & dog start making excuses for why this could be so, perhaps the story itself is suspect, certainly no rational explanation can be made for something that defies rational explanation.

Yes there is more to the story, the customer started talking to the vendor about this prospective purchase in November last year, and got replies, so it’s not like they were unaware of suddenly emails are being sent to the wrong address or anything else.

He is going to ring them next week, he suspects the answer will be the same as last time, his emails were marked as spam and nobody ever saw them.

Again, it raises questions, how can the gmail account of a known cash customer not be whitelisted and flagged as a cash customer for immediate personal attention by sales?

This could be ACME corp or Twatter / Amazone / NetFucks, it makes no odds, or Uber, or Pets.com, or anyone else, never really made a trading profit, yet everyone involved is a billionaire and the market caps are larger than many countries.

Like housing the stocks are worth investing in because they have always been worth investing in because they have always risen in price.

They have always risen in price, BECAUSE they have always risen in price.

For values of always that a 20 year mortgage is a human generation, so nobody with a mortgage today has ever known anything different, no exceptions, anywhere, word…

Calling a “peak” is like falling down a mountainside in the pitch dark, you can’t see a fucking thing but you’ve been bumping and sliding so fucking long it stands to reason you must be close to the bottom now… right?

I mean, we have been sliding down this particular mountainside in the pitch dark for twenty five fucking years now, so the only rational thought can be that the mountainside itself is infinite in expanse, there is no bottom to it.

I’ve mentioned the Hargesian Goat Bubble here before, it’s worth googling and reading, in 2007 it was funny, now it’s scary, by 2025 Mr Wibur Smythe-Mahmoud of 27 Orchard Road will be in a position where his 3 bedroom semi detached house has a greater capital monetary value than the GDP of Bolivia…

Merely owning a hovel will make everyone an automatic millionaire, anyone with anything with two or more bedrooms will be a multi-millionaire, and the best goes on, yet, when I was a boy at a prestigious English boarding school in the 1970’s with all the career advantages that that bestowed, it was arguable/doubtful whether I would see a million pounds pass through my hands in my entire fucking lifetime, no matter how successful I became, 40 years working 50 weeks a year is 2,000 and 1,000,000 / 2,000 = 500 a week, at a time when the national average gross wage packet was £65… a new mini on the road was around 650 quid, beer was 36 p a pint and 20 cigarettes was 22 p, and we’d just gone through the OPEC crisis and inflation / stagflation so it wasn’t like nobody thought prices would not rise over a working lifetime.

2,500 to 4,000 would buy you a proper house, freehold, 10 grand something nice and pre war with a sea view and a 60 foot front garden and a 100 feet back garden, so talk of tens and hundreds of thousands of pounds, even a million pounds, was ridiculous stupendous meaningless except as numbers sorts of money, because this flipside was at an average national wage of 65 quid a week (paid in cash ever week mind you) a 650 quid mini was ten weeks wages, and a 2.5 grand house was 38 weeks wages, the 10 grand very respectable good area house 152 weeks wages.

Today average weekly wages are £528, nobody down here earns that, full time bus driver with overtime can earn 18k which is £346 a week, but we will take the £500 number.

Ten weeks is £5,000 which won’t buy any new car on the road, though it will very very nearly buy a Dacia Sandero.

152 weeks is £76k, go on rightmove and the lowest price house within 10 miles is £68,960 and it is a “park home” which is estate agent speak for a 12 x 40 static caravan, the cheapest actual bricks and mortar *house* is £150k and it’s on the local sink council estate, the closest thing to the aforementioned 10k 1970’s house is £575k, and at 500 a week that is 1,150 weeks wages, a far cry from 152 weeks.

So back to the plot.

Back in 1994 I said it was insane and unsustainable, I did say surely it must end / pop soon, for values of soon that surely could not be more than a few years away, but I did not actually call the peak being imminent.

Today in 2017 I would say much the same, I can’t call the peak being imminent, I still say it is surely unsustainable but I’ve been wrong about the ability of the insanity to continue to escalate for 23 years, and as stated it is intellectually dishonest and bankrupt to use those sentiments as a vehicle for some other message.

That message being that it is a set-up for monetary reform (new bucks instead of old bucks) and indentured servitude, because quite honestly I do not know.

I do know I only have two possible hopes of having enough money to buy some land (not even a property of 1970’s 5k house) and that is either a lottery win or get successful in business and earn it, and frankly speaking if I earned it, no way I’d throw my earned money at anything so insanely overinflated, it would be like buying twitter stock… eg devaluing every single hour of work I did to earn the money to the point of uselessness.

THIS then becomes the real test of whether there is a bubble and if we are nearing the peak, what happens to the accumulated (however meagre they may be) efforts of your work to date?

A house whose value rises tenfold or drops tenfold serves the exact same utility to those living within, so if I was worth £575k last month but only £57k this month it still keeps you warm and dry and the bath and cooker still work and so on.

When it vanishes like my late father’s pension plan it is a different kettle of fish, that lump sum and income that was going to keep you in relative comfort for 20 years, gone… now you need some other method of putting food on your table and clothes on your back.

In Weimar germany and hyperinflation the loaf of bread had the same utility every day, cops still grew, mills still functioned, bakers still knew how to bake, what happened was the accumulated efforts of your work this week disappeared by the time pay day came around, come friday your whole week’s work was only worth what one hour was worth on monday morning, if you could have cashed in every hours work and spent it immediately you would have been ok

In effect, they worked for twitter stock, but when they wanted to buy something, only apple stock had any value, and rinse and repeat as often as possible.

So intellectual honesty and integrity means it doesn’t matter about calling the peak or the bursting of the bubble, all that matters is preserving as much as possible the fruits of your accumulated labour to date.

*that* is when it becomes interesting, nobody can take away from me my ability to turn flowing water into mechanical motion into electricity, nobody can take away from me the sex I have had, nobody can take away from me the places I have been and the things I have done, the fuck I had today is worth a million times more than the promise of a threesome with a pair of Romanian teeny twins with monster tits tomorrow.

My psycho skank ho ex took *a* possible future away from my sons, and it was only ever a possible future, played out one day at a time, so they could grow up with a dad like I did, some dads destroy themselves over that, just like some folks jump off a bridge when their company folds and their pension goes up in smoke.

the essential difference between the fruits of your accumulated labour to date, and the expected fruits of your accumulated labour in the future.

one can be preserved somewhere on a scale from 0% on up, the other one is the promise of the threesome, everything that isn’t likely to preserve at least some of what you have done to date is a distraction.

peaks and bubbles are a distraction.

as you slide down that endless mountainside in the dark, make sure you are listening to all of the people further down the slope in the night, because you can’t avoid the same journey, but you can approach it differently…